but how many of these women watch the entire show without being clucking like chickens (for poser is the same).

I would say from my own experience, talking and being in the scene that 95% are total posers. They just want to date the hot guy with long hair in the band. I swear, their opening line is " Do you listen to Metallica, their like, my favorite band"! For some reason I have the same response, pause, head tilt, slight smile "uh yeah I like Metallica". I do like Metallica's older music, but jesus fucking christ.

Theres a certain type of girl who likes to put herself into places where she's surrounded by dudes just to prop up her fragile ego. Auto body shops, metal shows, computer programming classes, whatever. Like the female equivalent of some sad guy who hangs out with all women and is "just one of the girls".

Bitches like that are the reason why when I do attend metal shows, I keep my hair short and rock polo shirts and other nerdy looking clothes. My favorite shirt to wear when I play my own shows is blue and says: "Grouse Mountain - the Peak of British Columbia".

Oh shit, do you live in Vancouver? I live pretty near to the base of Grouse.

I was studying Computer Engineering until I lost all motivation, failed all my courses, and dropped out. I took a while off, and I'm currently re-taking a few courses while working as a cashier full-time. If I didn't hate cashiering so much I'd likely not have returned at all.

Besides that, I've been reading lots of Lovecraft, playing Smash Bros Melee competitively, and working out, loathe it though I do. I was given an acoustic guitar a couple months ago by a family friend, so I've been practicing that, mostly playing nostalgic songs from N64 games. I'm not the ubermensch that metal demands of me, but I don't think I'm the aspie you might think I am, either. I'm just an average depressed nerd, I suppose.

Also, what is it with all the computer science metalheads, and why are there none at my university in particular? Never had a conversation about metal in person in my life.

I don't think the experiments ever claimed that metal makes organisms wither away and die. Most of them focus on how they affect mood and aggression levels, if memory serves, in which case, plants are not very valid as test subjects. If metal made its listeners more physically robust, as it did these plants, that would probably be a bad thing if coupled with greater destructive tendencies.

My feelings on the subject are sort of the inverse of this. Magic, which I include with esoteric practices and superstition, are born of people observing unexplainable phenomena and managing to manipulate them without fully understanding the underlying mechanisms at work. Dead Last's first post here illustrates that fairly well; that tarot cards work by allowing us to catch a glimpse of our subconscious. Of course, we haven't figured out everything the brain is capable of and how it works, so this kind of magic is the most practical method we have at the moment. As science progresses, we no longer need our pseudo-scientific approaches, being able to get more effective results through mathematically and physically proven methods. Unfortunately, this takes the element of the unknown out of the equation and sterilizes the aesthetic value of it. (Like dissecting a frog: You understand how the frog works, but it kills the frog in the process).

An example I really like to pull out is how, in the old testament, shellfish are forbidden from being eaten. This is because shellfish are a hotbed for dangerous bacteria, but as the actual cause of this problem was not known to the ancient Jews, it became easier to attribute the disease to the wrath of God. Even though in fact God had put out no such decree, the Jewish people still benefited from this "supernatural" dietary restriction.

I don't know the first thing about horror movies, but I've been getting into H.P. Lovecraft recently and have been noticing more and more parallels between his work and the metal world. Not only are there many direct mentions to his works from bands such as Morbid Angel, Metallica, Therion, and Sentenced, but even his worldview is shared by many bands, in the form of his cosmic pessimism/nihilism, as well as a focus on ethnocentrism (not that I support this). I've half a mind to start a thread myself focusing solely on him and his contributions to the metal canon.

And this is why tech death is a moronic genre descriptor: it differentiates itself from death metal by being more technical. That's barely a distinction at all! Gorguts and Atheist sound nothing alike, and yet they're lumped together based on how hard it is to play their music.